


i've been meaning to tell you (i think your house is haunted)

by quirkily



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Adult Eddie Kaspbrak, Adult Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Adult Losers Club (IT), Adult Richie Tozier, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Fluff and Angst, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Ghost Eddie Kaspbrak, I will add more characters as they appear - Freeform, M/M, POV Eddie Kaspbrak, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-IT Chapter Two (2019), Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Sad Gay Richie Tozier, Temporary Character Death, and the others a little but mainly richie, eddie haunts richie, eventually, the haunting is friendly, we will get there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:00:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25626331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quirkily/pseuds/quirkily
Summary: Eddie wakes up in between life and death. Seeing how hard Richie has taken his death, Eddie decides to stick around and haunt him. Just to make sure that he will be okay. Once Richie has dealt with his grief and moved on, Eddie can too.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 11
Kudos: 22





	1. though i can't recall your face, i still got love for you

**Author's Note:**

> I have been a member of clown town for most of this year so I figured it was past time to write a fic for these two repressed middle-aged men! I'm hardly the first person to come up with a ghost au but I really love the concept so wanted to have a go at it! I wrote this as a way to try and get back into writing after not doing it for a while, so it is purely motivated by fun and is therefore not beta-d. Please forgive any errors. Also, forgive my interesting spacing, it might be a bit cliche but as I mentioned... fun! 
> 
> Content warnings; Eddie is technically still dead at the moment and the others are grieving him, he has recurring thoughts about his own mortality, implied references to Eddie and Stan's deaths, descriptions of anxiety responses, and a weird metaphor about donating blood that is 100% because I had to have a blood test last week and need another one soon and am projecting onto Eddie. Myra is in this chapter but she does not directly interact with Eddie, and her presence in the fic will be limited. Their relationship is unhealthy and strained but I am not planning to go in-depth into themes of abuse in this fic if that's something you are concerned about. If I've missed something you want me to warn for, don't hesitate to let me know! 
> 
> Also, the title for this fic and all of the chapter titles come from Taylor Swift's "Seven" because folklore is yet another album full of excellent lyrics. Seven, in particular, is a very Eddie song to me, I had it on repeat while writing this chapter, and you will gather why I associate it with him so much from the aforementioned titles. You should still go listen to it and think of him now I've told you though! ;)

Eddie is floating. 

That’s not something he should be doing, he thinks vaguely, bodies aren’t meant to float, but he can’t piece together why that thought makes his breath rattle in his chest. 

His vision is tinted red, that colour you see when sunlight hits your closed eyelids, except his eyes are open. Everything is blurry which is odd because he’s always had perfect vision, it was the one area of his health that had never required frequent check-ups. 

He can hear the echo of a faint laugh somewhere far away. 

He notices his feet again, the way they are suspended above the air, and exhaustion washes through him. He could move if he wanted to, he’s sure, it just seems like so much... effort. 

There’s a high pitched sound going off now, and he nonsensically curses New York for always having an alarm going off no matter the hour. Don’t they know what time it is? 

Eddie doesn’t know. It has to be late though, because he’s just so  _ tired _ . 

His vision narrows down until all he can see is a glistening smile. He should be afraid, maybe, but mostly he’s confused. 

He hasn’t had a dream in years.

He usually sleeps like the dead. 

  
  
Eddie is floating.

His arms don’t have any sensation, which seems odd, but he’s sure its nothing to worry about. 

That makes him pause but he doesn’t know why. 

There’s a balloon floating past him. He should move away from it, he thinks slowly and notes with muffled surprise that he’s drifting away from it now. He’s not entirely sure how. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Eddie is floating. 

Someone else is crying.

Big, loud, ugly crying. The sound tugs something in his chest and he wants to follow it. He knows that sound. 

He should stop floating soon, he thinks, it can’t be good for his health. 

He is full of thoughts now, but he can’t tell which are his. They build up and up and up until

_ Eddie bear, don’t do that, you’ll hurt  _

_ your prescription, Mr Kaspbrak _

_ Get down from there that instant! You know your heart is  _

_ Your cardio levels are better than most, sir _

_ I’m only trying to look out for you _

_ But what about your health?  _

_ It’s my asthma!  _

_ You know you aren’t well!  _

_ Oh yeah, my heart was really pumping last night, your mum really  _

_ You’ll  _

_ Float _

_ Too _

He’s outside of a pharmacy. The streets are empty and the doors to the store are closed, the windows dark. 

__

He doesn’t remember how he got here. 

__

He moves to step forward but he can’t feel the ground beneath his feet. With growing horror, he looks down. 

__

He is standing an inch above the ground. Or, not standing, he supposes, since he isn’t exactly sure how his weight is being distributed right now. Does he have any weight?

__

Does he have a  _ body _ ? 

__

He seizes with fear, with the visceral reminder of his own mortality, the same feeling he gets from blood tests, not pain, not that prick of the needle, but afterwards; that knowledge as the blood goes out of his body that he’s giving up part of his life force, and the terror that brings, the urgent aversion of his eyes as if turning away from it will make him any less mortal. 

__

His breathing is shallow and he doesn’t have an inhaler on him because he doesn’t even have

_ a body. _

Which means he doesn’t have  _ lungs.  _

Which means he can’t breathe. 

Or have fucking  _ asthma _ . 

He waits for a moment, waiting for the panic to get worse like it always does; after the short breaths always come the tremors, and the dizziness, and then the dry mouth. 

But instead, he just feels light. 

A weight he’s carried with him for so long has been lifted from his chest because he doesn’t  _ have _ a chest. 

He feels giddy with it and  _ laughs _

_ and laughs _

_ and laughs _

_ and laughs  _

There’s a man on the stage. It’s a small stage, cramped at the back of a dark room, badly lit so that it emphasises the stains on the wood. 

__

Eddie has never been here before. 

__

The man is holding a microphone and grinning wide, but it sits wrong on his face. He laughs but it sounds like it tears his throat on the way up. 

__

Eddie has seen this man before. 

__

“What do you get when a depressed forty-year-old walks into a bar?” 

__

There’s something in his eyes that makes Eddie want to get closer and then all of a sudden he’s on the stage with him.

__

No one sees him. 

__

The comedian continues, “Well,  _ you all  _ get some fucking terrible comedy,” he points at the audience, only a few of whom are paying attention to him. He jerks his thumb towards himself, “I, on the other hand, get a free drink.” There’s scattered laughter. 

__

He looks so sad and Eddie reaches out as if to brush away the hair stuck to his face, not knowing why, but needing this man to 

__

notice

him. 

He’s back at the pharmacy again. 

He moves closer to it, across the street one moment and at the door the next. The windows are dusty, and the posters advertising healthy lifestyles and supplements are worn around the edges, slowly peeling away from the tack keeping them in place. 

The sign above the door reads “Keene’s” and it’s old and weathered too, a sign of the passage of time. 

It’s darker than before and the streets are still empty. Eddie thinks that maybe he’s the last person left in the universe. 

He doesn’t know what to make of that. It sounds peaceful, he decides. He can do whatever he wants, now. No one to tell him what to do. 

There’s a shrill voice in his ears, or a couple of them, he can’t tell. 

Being alone is a good thing, he decides. 

Something draws him around the corner of the shop, into the dark alleyway. The bricks are weathered and rubbish rolls down the passage between buildings. 

He stares at it for a while until he realises that it’s the first thing he’s seen move out in this dark street. It breaks the illusion of the silent bubble Eddie had begun to think he was living within. 

It also means there must be a breeze, but Eddie can’t feel it on his skin. He doesn’t think about that for too long. 

He leans down to see if he can pick something up but hesitates. Touching things in dirty alleyways just seems like asking for

“Trouble.”

An old man is scowling down his glasses at another man, “That’s what you are, Denbrough. Trouble. You can’t keep trying to fit in more scenes at the last minute.”

Eddie starts at the name. Denbrough? 

The other man speaks, “Better than not having any ideas, though, right?” and pats him on the arm before turning around and looking Eddie right in the face. 

_ Bill _ , he thinks suddenly with gasping clarity and 

the world

spins 

No. Eddie is sick of being tugged around wherever this mindfuckery wants to take him. 

“Bill,” he whispers and he’s even closer now, breathing on the back of his neck, which he feels bad about when Bill flinches but he’s just remembered his first-ever friend and he can’t be left 

alone 

again.

This time, Eddie kicks the pharmacy door hard enough to hurt. Except it doesn’t. One of the bottles on display inside falls over. He can’t even be grateful for this small victory because he’s been overtaken with such sudden sorrow. 

His earlier thought about being alone in the universe is suddenly frightening and far too real. 

He had forgotten, he thinks. Again. 

His thoughts are still tacky and maybe there are drugs in his system, maybe he’s in a hospital somewhere, or maybe his brain is slowly shutting down and he’s working with the functions he has left. 

If this is his final tour of the world before he passes on, it’s not the fucking reel of happy memories he had sometimes imagined it to be. 

_ Richie,  _ he thinks all of a sudden. He’d always been imagining Richie on those dark nights when he longed for happy memories and had none. He’d forgotten him and still, he had thought of him in some small way, finding comfort in him. 

It’s not comforting anymore. Here he is, going through his slide show of memories, and he’d almost touched Richie’s face without remembering him. 

Whatever supernatural entity was fucking with him this time sure liked irony.

Was 

It

the same entity?

Had they killed it? 

“But how can we be sure?” Mike insists, and Eddie takes vicious pride in the fact that he recognises him instantly. 

He’s improving. He’s going to fucking figure out what’s going on here and then he’s going to fix it. 

“Mike,” says a voice from the other side of a phone, and it’s  _ Bev _ , Eddie realises with a jolt, hearing her as clearly as if she’s in the same room as Mike. 

He supposes it makes sense that he can hear multiple places at once. Why the fuck not? 

“We thought we had it last time, but,” Mike looks on the verge of tears, frantic, but somehow his voice sounds clear and insistent. It shocks Eddie a little, this display of emotion from Mike, someone who he had always viewed as a stable presence to be relied upon. He feels guilty at the thought, the reminder of how much responsibility Mike had taken upon himself and how the rest of them had just let him. Maybe they could be forgiven for doing it as kids, as teenagers, listening to their friend claim a genuine interest in sticking around and knowing he was lying but not knowing what else they could do, full of guilty relief that it didn’t have to be them. Eddie doesn’t think any of them have any excuse for doing it to him again as an adult. 

“Mike,” Bev says firmly, but kindly, “If it was like that this time we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I remember you. Everyone remembers you. You remember us even though you’ve left Derry. We got out.”

Eddie looks around at that, taking note of the room they’re in. It’s a private study room, likely part of a library, but it’s not the Derry library as he had assumed. The book in front of Mike is open to an illustration of a man being killed by a mythological creature. 

“Not all of us,” Mike says quietly. Then louder; “Not all of us got out, Bev.”

He sounds so fucking guilty that it makes Eddie angry. It wasn’t his fucking fault he died. It wasn’t anyone’s fault he died and he wasn’t going to stand around letting them beat themselves up about it. 

He touches Mike’s shoulder but doesn’t get any reaction as he had with Bill. Eddie doesn’t know how any of this works! If he was going to be sent into this weird limbo state he could have at least been given an instruction manual! 

He looks at the book again, and awash with a new wave of frustration, he tries to pick it up. The weight is too much but his movement must do something, push energy or air or fucking magic because the pages flip over several times and land on a chapter called “Spiritual Connections.”

“He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself, Mike,” and thank fuck for Beverly Marsh always getting to the root of the problem when no one else would say it. Or couldn’t, like Eddie right now. He probably wouldn’t have said it so nicely. But then again, if Eddie was there to say something, Mike wouldn’t be feeling guilty. 

“Who?” Mike laughs bitterly, “Stan? Because I’m not so sure about that. He was never one for lying to make someone feel better and the correlation on that one is pretty clear cut. He’s a mathematician, yeah? One careless phone call from a dumb librarian plus one accountant with mental health issues equals-” he chokes on the sentence but is quick to continue before Bev can interrupt him, “Or what about Eddie, huh? You say he doesn’t blame me, but his wife clearly does. She found my number in his last calls you know, I was a prime suspect in his missing person case for a while there, because he’s still ‘missing’ because we don’t have an excuse good enough to explain how we would  _ know,  _ like what are we meant to do, Bev?”

Eddie’s...  _ wife? _

Mike’s voice fades out and Eddie’s vision swims as if the picture in front of him is being taken apart and put together again. It’s different to before which had been like dying in a video game, one place one moment, black screen, back at the start again. 

He doesn’t go back to the start page either, using that analogy, reappearing in a lounge room rather than back at the pharmacy.

It’s his lounge room. 

Or, it  _ was _ his lounge room. Eddie isn’t sure he can claim ownership of anything when he isn’t even in possession of a body. 

Myra is in the kitchen. He can see her through the adjoining doorway. He stays where he is. 

She’s humming, which is something that she only does when Eddie isn’t around and always seems embarrassed to be caught doing. She had always been so worried about seeming mature and respectable. Desperate for Eddie to be responsible and serious so that she could brag about her business husband. 

It had always been stifling but now he feels trapped with it, caged back up in this ugly expensive apartment with its sleek modern design. Eddie had asked for some colour but that hadn’t fit the image Myra wanted to project to the dinner guests they never ended up having. 

He thinks of his childhood, of his mother and her expectations, and then he looks at Myra in front of him and he wants to scream with it. He thinks of Richie, of the losers, of their voices carrying down the quarry, bouncing around the clubhouse, annoying people in the cinema. He thinks of himself, small and full of feeling, expressing it every chance he got away from his mother, counting down the time until he had to go back and be meek and quiet and her perfect fucking son. 

Eddie hasn’t had a chance to let go and scream for twenty odd years. Well, until a few days ago. 

Was it a few days? How long had it been since… 

He walks over to the kitchen cautiously, afraid for the first time since regaining whatever form of consciousness that he has, of being seen. 

The calendar is on the wall where it has always been. 

The page reads “September.” It’s a month later. 

This seems wrong, but also… the losers he’s seen so far have gotten back to their lives. They couldn’t have done that in a couple of days. It makes sense. 

Myra does not look like a woman worrying over a husband who has been missing for a month. That makes sense too. It’s the same as her whistling; there’s no one else around.

It is still dark on the street outside of Keene’s. Eddie is not sure whether time is passing differently here, slower, time not flowing during his trips to see the others, or if he is in a space outside of reality altogether. 

Not having anything to base his sense of time on is freaking him out just a bit. It feels like he’s had a big day full of visits to people, even if they have only been a handful of minutes at a time. He’s tired but he’s also terrified that closing his eyes will end whatever is happening right now, like whatever entity has given him this will think that he’s given up or made his peace and is deciding to pass on now. 

Eddie doesn’t want to go. He’s not sure if he thinks there will be an afterlife, he hadn’t at all before, but now he’s a ghost of some sort and maybe that’s all there is.

Eddie doesn’t want to be trapped here but he also doesn’t want to fade away to black. He’s not done yet. He hasn’t seen the rest of the losers yet. 

He hasn’t seen Richie while actually knowing who he is. He hasn’t made sure that he’s okay, or that he will be, because he looked a mess on that stage and Eddie can’t just leave him like that. 

But his eyes are refusing to stay open and he thinks maybe ghost travel has drained him and then he thinks that ghosts needing sleep is some dumb fucking bullshit, and then he passes out. 

  



	2. i hit my peak at seven feet in the swing over the creek

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warnings; brief mention of Sonia Kasprak's manipulation and bad parenting, more imagery around bodies and physicality (in particular eyes), discussion of exercise and asthma, vague sarcastic comment alluding to alcoholism

It takes Eddie a while to realise that he’s dreaming.

He isn’t sure how he figures out that this is different from the floating and the drifting that he’s already been doing, but as soon as he wonders why he’s seeing a memory rather than something current, the knowledge slots into place. 

He’s watching a thirteen-year-old version of himself jump into the quarry. The angle must place him at the bottom of the cliff, in the water already, but the details are fuzzy and he can’t feel sensations. Everything is focused on him like a snapshot in time, one of those old polaroids, or maybe a spotlight, making him the star of the stage. 

Eddie doesn’t think this is his dream. 

It should be a terrifying thought. He should be filled to the brim with anxiety at the thought of being trapped in someone else’s mind.

He feels comfortable. The sun is bright and he can almost feel the phantom touch of warmth. The memory of the rushing freedom he had always felt as he fell through the air is something he’s glad to be reminded of. More than that, though, he feels safe in this hazy bubble. It’s different from that lonely street on Derry. 

He doesn’t feel alone here. 

  
  


He’s disappointed when the dream ends and he fades back to consciousness in Derry. He’s inside the pharmacy now and he thinks that if he still had a beating heart it would have stopped. 

It’s dark in here and the shelves look looming and menacing and Eddie thinks there’s a strange puddle in the corner. He stands very still and blinks. 

He finds himself in the park now. There’s a bench in front of him, and he hesitantly sits on it, relieved to find that he doesn’t sink through it, even if the way he hovers is still disconcerting. 

They’d all sat on this bench a long time ago. Eddie hadn’t gone to the park very often, terrified of bugs and grass allergies and pollen and anything else he could discover from books in the library, fascinated in a way that was closer to fear than genuine interest. The one time he can remember sitting here and not worrying about his asthma, he had been far more afraid of something else. 

It’s not a good memory, not really, but it’s still comforting, that feeling of not being alone. 

  
  


The scene around him shifts slower this time, letting him go along with it and adjust rather than being jolted from one place to the next. 

For a moment he thinks he’s still outside, but then he notices the giant glass windows between him and the forest. Are they still windows if they take up most of the building? At what point do they just become glass walls? He would have to ask-

“Ben!” someone says, and it's accompanied with laughter and feet scuffing on carpet.

Eddie turns slowly, reluctant to look away from the trees, but seeing two of his best friends again makes it worthwhile. They’re wrestling, sort of, the way he and Richie used to, playful and fun, but they’re being softer than he ever was. Eddie had always hidden behind pinches and jabbing elbows, yelled declarations of war, and been just a little bit too mean in his desperation. 

Bev and Ben don’t need excuses. 

Ben grabs Bev by her waist and tosses her over his shoulder while she laughs and kicks her legs in fake protest. He takes her across the large open room to what Eddie assumes must be the living area because it has a couch and not much else. He dramatically drops her on the couch, careful to make sure she doesn’t hit her head before moving to join her. He hesitates just before lying completely over her, and Bev takes the opportunity to flip them over.

Eddie thinks that he shouldn’t be watching this, has the childish urge to yell “gross!’ at his friends as they make out, but he also just feels… content?

There’s still regret, sadness at having missed them getting together, but it's nice to know that they’re doing okay without him. They’re happy and they have each other and that’s all Eddie could ever want for them. 

  
  


There’s something nagging at the back of Eddie’s mind and he knows the longer that he ignores it the worse his worry will get. 

This time, when he arrives in the alley next to the pharmacy, he turns around and makes his way towards the outskirts of town. He knows he could blink and be there if he wanted to but he takes his time. 

He finds himself watching his feet as he walks, one step at a time, that old fear of what he might see if he looks up creeping back in. Old habits die hard, he supposes.

The grass gets drier the further he walks, and the road changes from deep black tarmac to faded gray, rocks coming loose with age. It changes to dirt right before you reach the farmlands on the outskirts of town. He’d counted the steps once. How far from one edge of town to the other; how many feet he needed to travel in order to reach the town sign and step over the border. What were the dimensions of the place that had trapped and suffocated him all his life?

It had taken him most of the day. He’d mixed up the number by the time he got home and his mum had been in tears, fretting over him until he promised not to spend so long in the sun again. He hadn’t left the house for a week. 

Eddie isn’t sure how long it takes for him to reach the dirt road but the first thing he notices is the sunflowers. They’re frozen in middair, dozens of them, as if having been expelled outwards from an explosion. Other things are stuck in the air too; planks of wood, shards of glass. 

Something uneasy settles in Eddie’s gut. 

In the middle of it all is Neibolt. Except- 

Eddie feels as if he is staring at an optical illusion, one of those ones with two pictures and the more you stare the more it flicks back and forth between them. It strains his eyes and that worries him because moments before he had been sure that he didn’t have any eyes to strain, but now he is acutely aware of their existence inside his head. 

Neibolt is there. And also, it’s not. 

One second; the menacing house that haunted his childhood, the place that he died. The next moment; a vacant lot, the remaining ruins of a collapsed building. 

What he’s seeing in the air around him must be a middle point between the two versions of Neibolt, he realises. It feels less like a moment frozen in time, and more like two realities overlapping each other. The building is both there and not. 

Schroedinger’s Neibolt. It’s a joke Stan would have made, and Eddie can hear him saying it; quiet and wry, not demanding attention like Richie. 

Everything shifts for a moment, tilting right and then snapping back into place. He sways with it, watching as the flowers flicker around the edges like a glitch in an old video game. 

Eddie has the unsettling feeling that he’s just another piece of debris caught in Neibolt’s destruction. 

He needs to get out of here but when he thinks about moving, nothing happens. He can feel a tug tight in his chest, pulling him towards the centre of it and he has the sudden fear that if he moves a single step he’s going to be sucked into Neibolt like it’s a black hole. 

Eddie leans back and

slowly pushes himself 

out.

He instinctively gasps for breath but any sensation he had felt in his body has disappeared again. He’s grateful.

He looks around him this time, eyes no longer trained on the ground, and notices that Neibolt is no longer visible. Everything is blurred as if he is looking in through frosted glass, the destruction self-contained in its own little bubble. 

Eddie feels exhausted and the trek back into the town centre feels long and tireless even without the physical pain of exercise. 

He thinks of Richie then, sudden and all-encompassing, the way thoughts of Richie always are. They’d argued about exercise countless times, rotating through opinions on whether it was fun or boring, good for your health or a guaranteed cause of asthma and scraped knees. Richie’s arguments had always been simple and based upon challenging whatever Eddie was saying, but Eddie’s relationship to the topic had always been more complicated. He had never understood how he could long for and fear something so much at the same time. How the desperation to run, run, run could beat so strongly in his heart when he knew it would only leave him gasping and burning.

Right now, all Eddie wants is to lie down and drink some

  
  


“Tea,” Richie sighs, “it’s tea, Beverly. A new blend a handsome suitor sent me. Don’t you worry, I’m not drinking myself under the table at midday.” 

Eddie hears Bev mutter something about other times of the day but Richie ignores her, jamming his phone between his ear and shoulder in a way that makes his shirt stretch across his back. He uses his freed up hand to grab the sugar pot from the back of the bench as he takes his mug out of the microwave. 

“Do thank Ben for the tea, won’t you?” He asks as he dunks the tea bag into the hot water, scooping in a ridiculous amount of sugar afterwards. 

“Of course, Richie,” Bev is saying, “He’ll be glad to hear you’re drinking it. Some psychic lady at the markets convinced him it has some positive healing properties or something, and you know Ben…” 

“Hah,” Richie laughs softly, spoon clinking rhythmically as he stirs, “Magic tea?” He looks like he’s going to make a joke of it but thinks better of it and stops. 

The silence holds. 

Richie looks worse than he had up on that bar stage. Maybe it’s because Eddie knows him now, can recognise the lines on his face better, has more empathy for his best friend than for an anonymous stranger. Or maybe Richie’s just gotten worse. 

He wants to touch his face again but he thinks back to how Bill had flinched and thoughts of Richie spilling hot water over himself stills Eddie’s hand. 

“Well,” Richie says abruptly, deciding that the quiet has gone on for long enough, “I better get going then, Miss Ringwald.”

“Richie-” Bev starts, but he’s already ending the call. 

Richie slumps as soon as he puts down the phone, all the energy deflating out of him as if he had been putting on an act even if she couldn’t see him. He takes a seat at the kitchen bench and lays his face on his arms against the cool stone. 

He lets out one long deep breath and then whispers, the quietest Eddie’s ever heard him, so soft it’s only audible because the rest of Richie’s apartment is deathly silent.

“I don’t fucking know what to do, Eds.” 

Eddie doesn’t either but he’s sure as shit not leaving Richie alone like this. He tries to pull out the stool next to him before realising that he can’t and then debates over sitting on the kitchen bench itself before deciding that if he doesn’t have a body that means he doesn’t have any germs. It’s still weird, the motion of sitting without any sensation or solidity to lean upon. 

It’s nice though, if only for how it makes him taller than Richie for once. It lets him see his face this way too, watching as Richie picks up his head and starts drinking the tea. It’s a bright pink colour, probably some type of fruit. Richie doesn’t make any expressions to indicate whether he likes it or not. 

They just sit there, the two of them, the quietest they’ve ever been, as the light through the kitchen window dims and the mug slowly empties of tea. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed it! I'm heading into a hellish week of assignments and exams so I wanted to try and get this out into the world first or otherwise it'd stay in my drafts for another month... it was also helped along by my procrastination lol
> 
> once I'm not drowning in work, please do come chat with me at __quirkily on twitter (that's two underscores!)

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed it! I'm not going to make any promises about an update schedule because that has always jinxed me in the past, but I pumped this chapter out very quickly, so we'll see. This is also the first fic I've written in years that I haven't outlined before writing, so I have no idea how long it will be. 
> 
> Please come chat with me on twitter, @__quirkily (that is two underscores!)


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